Aside from the enormous, above-inflation rise in the price of beer—despite the temperance lobby's disingenuous assertion that alcohol has become more "affordable"—I'm struck by how much the price of a pint has increased even since 2007.

The book was published by CAMRA so £2.24 pint was presumably the average cost of real ale, but anecdotal evidence tells me that the price must have risen to around £3 in the four years since, no? Does anybody have some 2011 prices to complete the picture?

Chris,You and your readers might be interested in this link. It’s what happens when medicos get the opportunity to push their physicalist framework. Physicalists view people as just another animal, slightly more complex than rats. And they view society as a lab of rats which they rule. Properly speaking, they view humans as a “herd” that can be “engineered” along certain physical dimensions (i.e., eugenics).

In an effort to keep health-care costs in check, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio took a hard line to improve the health of its employees, The Washington Post reported earlier this year. It fired physicians who refused to quit smoking. It eliminated almost all fried foods, sugary sodas and trans fats from its campus. It offered free fitness and stress-management classes to its workers. And it began keeping track of its employees’ blood pressure, lipids, blood sugar, weight and smoking habits. If any of these are “abnormal,” the clinic requires that a doctor certify that the employee is taking measures to control them or else they don’t receive an insurance rebate.

Chris,You might also be interested in a series of posts by “Shadow Guest” on Siegel’s blog concerning apartment bans in Australia. The push for such bans will be coming to the UK, if it’s not there already.

I think the same applies to other sin taxes like fuel and tobacco duty. Profiteering and price fixing by the state to extract as much money as they can from the public. And, more so nowadays, bombarding us with ethical and health reasons for doing so.

In 1973 the price of a pint of lager was 17p (in Yorkshire). The price in London is a pretty standard £4 a pint now. The lager itself cost about 1p a pint to produce but the pub buys it from the brewery / pubco / cash n carry for about £1.20 a pint.

The overheads of running a pub means that even with a £2.80 mark up on each pint, beer and lager are still loss-leaders for the majority of pubs - sales of beer add to your VAT bill and that's about it.

anything over 3 pounds is scandalous really. No wonder so many British pubs have closed down. However, my parents have informed me they rarely visited the pub in the 60s and 70s as it was quite expensive and they simply didn't have the disposable income...

About Me

Writer and researcher at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Blogging in a personal capacity.
Author of Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism (2015), The Art of Suppression (2011), The Spirit Level Delusion (2010) and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (2009).

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."